POURING Coca-Cola in the cabernet, Sofia Coppola’s dazzling “Marie Antoinette” couldn’t be more anachronistic if it showed the queen of France saying, “Let them eat sushi.” Coppola works in weird ways, but the real Versailles was so much weirder.

Just as Tobey Maguire proved that the superhero is about the vulnerability, Kirsten Dunst nicely unveils the innocence in the doomed queen of France. The 1980s score and 818 dialogue (“I love your hair! What’s going on there?”) may strike you as a little too droll for l’école. But the story follows Antonia Fraser’s biography, and the crazy flourishes simultaneously blast away the musty mists of history and make the audience feel, as the Austrian-born queen must have, lost in translation.

Torn away from home, she’s delivered in marriage to a man she’s never seen, the Dauphin/future Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). He’s a silent shrimp during the day (he plays with locks) and an empty bedshirt at night. Possibly there’s a problem with the royal scepter, but it’s just as likely that he didn’t get the memo about how the whole heir-production process works, exactly. On their wedding night, dozens of attendants hang around their bed while a red-swathed archbishop blesses the union in Latin (sexy!), but when everybody finally bows and leaves, the newlyweds just lie there, dunce and Dunst.

Marie Antoinette, the dauphine, spends her days in absurdity (it takes forever to get dressed because only the highest ranking lady present can dress her – but midway through, the dauphine has to wait naked as a succession of higher-ranking ladies enter). There are so many freakish protocols, buried feuds, status seekers and sluts on wheels that the palace resembles nothing so much as high school, with the dauphine as the despised new girl who managed to snag the rich kid, and the reigning King Louis XV (a chuckling Rip Torn) as the dirty old gym coach.

Coppola’s command of the language of cinema is a delight. Again and again, she creates character and story without a word of dialogue.

The death of a child is rendered by the mere switch of a portrait, and the queen realizes her approval ratings are in the tank when she applauds at an opera, but no one else joins in. (If ever there was a time for a Listening Tour, this is it.) The nerviest, most notorious choice is to bust out Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” on the soundtrack when Marie Antoinette gives up on sex and devotes herself to shoes and snacks. To this point, the movie has featured string quartets and rigid framing with the dauphine alone at the exact center, but now the camera skips around like a cheerleader. Coppola does wear out the pop sound, though, and the finale isn’t satisfying.

Could Marie Antoinette, emperor’s daughter, have been this naive? Dunst, tearfully parting with her pug as her character exits Austria, practically has a dotted line around her neck with instructions to “cut here,” and she makes no effort to starch up her squeaky American cuteness.

But though the real Marie Antoinette was born an archduchess, she was no older than a highschool freshman when she married. After that, she was just a victim of fashion, a pleated skirt when history went Goth. Her story could just as easily be called “Clueless.”